Due to the global sustainability trends, many Chinese manufacturers are struggling in balancing the environment cost, social cost and production cost. Although China has been considered as the world's manufacturing center in the past few decades, many operations in China are still facing challenges to achieve the goals of green operations due to many non-environmental factors, such as pricing and quality issues driven by customers, the economic uncertainty, legal compliance and pressure from different special interest groups. Furthermore, new environmental & legal regulations, consumer’s requirements, non-governmental organizations’ influences and the brands are pushing hard on Chinese manufacturers to resolve environmental issues. This paper examines the green manufacturing operation initiatives of eight reputable cases to gain insights into how to maintain the intricate balance between profit, social cost and environment cost in the garment industry in China. Face-to-face semi-structured interviews at different management levels were conducted. The strategies and practices in achieving green manufacturing operation are identified and analyzed using the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Model. This paper also anticipates that the green strategies and best practices identified can be transferred to other industries and can serve as a template for other green manufacturing operations to benchmark their green practices.